Out of the dieting craze came the more profitable culture of wellness. Today, the wellness industry is worth around $7 trillion, more than twice the GDP of France. Wellness is easier to capitalize on than its predecessor. Rather than scolding people into consuming less, it turns a desire for thinness, health, and control into a need for more buzzword-laden products and commodities that tell us that we are healthy, good, conscientious, and clean.
Unique to our time is the sheer volume of images through which such neurotic ideas about food are conveyed and exploited. The internet manufactures a seemingly endless stream of meals to be cooked, products to buy, lifestyles to emulate. Conveniently for the companies getting rich off this stuff, it can feel like the products we consume reflect something about the reality of who we are, even if our consumption of them is primarily visual.
These decisions are often mere projection, ideation without consummation. Images exist and reconfigure themselves in a cycle that perpetuates seemingly endless need. The aims of the low-end of this content industry — with its crackly chocolate bars and orange-hued ingredients that stretch, melt, and fizzle to produce an algorithmically perfected appeal — are often straightforward: buy this, crave that, share a video. The goals of the rest of it — from the slow cooking videos on a backdrop of a nondescript “farm,” to the high-end, art-coded content, like Titanic-length raspberry ladyfinger cake for Hermes — are more abstract.
Maybe the point is to get an influencer rich, maybe it is to sell a line of matte minimalist dinner plates. Whatever the shifting aims of online food culture, the sheer volume of its visual output suggests an economy geared around more than eating. It is about fantasy, craving, and addiction.
Food media as we know it emerged in the mid-twentieth century, with the advent of high-quality food photography. It was in the postwar era that cookbooks with…
Auteur: Anne-Laure White
